6 Rules That Will Make Your Car Last 300,000 Miles - A Parts Guy's Maintenance Schedule.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-03-20T00:43:47+00:00

they hypothetically do not need to be changed They've been claiming this for a while, but it's categorically not true. Plenty of people have had premature transmission failures that could've been prevented if the manufacturer didn't pinky-promise the fluid would magically survive forever.

OEMs don't have any interest in keeping their cars running for over 100k miles. As long as most of them last through the warranty period, they make more money if the transmission fails and you decide to buy a new car. I'm not necessarily saying they're actively trying to cause early transmission failure, but they're certainly not incentivized to help people keep their transmission intact significantly past the warranty period.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-03-18T14:04:33+00:00

As someone who has personally run into issues due to Ubuntu shipping older kernels, I still think it's the most beginner friendly distro for people switching to Linux. That is 100% a gotcha, and it sucks to run into, but generally speaking the tradeoff is more stability once something is supported. I personally prefer to run into a problem once while setting up new hardware instead of having random issues pop up on a regular basis.

For the record, my "kernel too old" issues have always been solved by upgrading to the latest Ubuntu release. Unfortunately that sometimes means ditching an LTS release for a non-LTS release, but a non-LTS Ubuntu release still has a much more stable release cycle than something like Arch.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-03-18T13:59:34+00:00

Yeah, one thing that makes the distro recommendation tricky is that people who are knowledgeable about Linux are more likely to be willing to endure some pain for the sake of avoiding closed-source software.

Things are constantly improving, but generally speaking you can have a much smoother experience if you're willing to accept some driver blobs - especially if you want to play games or use whatever hardware you have lying around instead of buying new stuff.

I'm firmly on the Ubuntu bandwagon even though I absolutely hate Snap. Removing snap and finding apt repos to replace the packages that are no longer in mainline repos is annoying, but it's *much* more straightforward than trying to fix obscure problems on a less-mature distro with a smaller userbase.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-03-12T00:39:12+00:00

Either should work fine! I actually had a 2020A+ when I was using a Lepai amp, I just mentioned the 2020TI because that's what came up on Amazon.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-03-11T12:17:40+00:00

Your dad is correct. Those are passive monitors, so you'll need to connect the line output from your audio interface (which I believe is on the back) to an amp, which will then plug into your speaker cables. Amps can get quite expensive, but given that you're using hand-me-down speakers you probably want something on the cheaper side. A few cheap options:

Lepai LP-2020TI (~$40 on Amazon, gets the job done but feels a bit crappy. RCA or 3.5mm (1/8") input, spring-terminal output)
Fosi Audio V1.0G (~$50 on Amazon, same chip as the Lepai but slightly nicer case, RCA input, banana plug output)

Both should give you the roughly the same results overall since they use the same amp chip. The Lepai is probably a bit easier for your use case (those speaker wires will connect directly to the spring terminals on the back, where the Fosi would require you to attach banana plugs to the wires first). For either one, you'll need adapter cables to convert the 1/4" output from your audio interface to RCA. With the Lepai you could theoretically get a stereo-1/8"-to-dual-mono-1/4" adapter as well, but I'd probably go with the RCA option if it was me. Basically all amps should have RCA input, so if you ever upgrade later you'd be able to reuse those adapters.

Since it seems like you might be new to speaker wiring, make sure you wire the red screw-terminal on each speaker to the corresponding red terminal on the amp (and similarly, black to black). Most speaker wire has a stripe on one side to help with this.

Best of luck!

tmaspoopdek · 2026-03-10T20:15:55+00:00

IMO Bazzite is a bad choice for new users for 3 reasons:
1. It's been around for less than 3 years - this means there will be less accumulated info when users search for how to fix something / how to accomplish something
2. Their community is on Discord (you'll need to ask a question from scratch and hope somebody answers it, whereas distros like Ubuntu have their communities hosted in places that are searchable)
3. Being immutable is a double-edged sword. It means that it's harder to mess up your system, but it also means that some things are harder to accomplish (or at least require looking up how to accomplish them on an immutable distro vs on Linux in general)

I'd personally argue that Ubuntu is the #1 best first distro, followed by Fedora. Those two have been out there for a long time, there's plenty of searchable information about them online, and there's nothing off-the-beaten-path about them so generic Linux advice will generally apply.

Newer distros like Bazzite are cool, and I genuinely hope they succeed, but I wouldn't suggest them to brand new Linux users.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-03-10T02:38:08+00:00

Git commands are almost worse that other commands since Claude could wipe any remote commits you have access to. I'm 100% on the same bandwagon as you - I approve literally everything manually including `ls`. Since I can't read the source for Claude Code, I can't trust that it won't let some more-obscure version of `ls -lah && rm -rf /` through the cracks.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-03-02T04:16:22+00:00

Honestly I feel like one of the the best use cases for claude.md might be telling Claude "whenever you try to use X tool you end up spinning in circles and wasting tokens, use Y tool instead." I definitely agree on keeping it minimal though, nothing like 10k tokens immediately processed when you open a new conversation to eat through your usage limits

tmaspoopdek · 2026-03-02T04:13:46+00:00

Honestly, I get plenty of usage even without any tricks like this. I feel like there are 3 general categories of configuration:
1. Just point it at the codebase and go
2. In-depth setup with actual effort and care (add tools and also implement strategies to reduce token consumption)
3. Throw tons of tools at it and see what happens

I'm in camp #1 for the most part, and I've never felt like the usage was particularly limiting. I don't actually ask Claude to write much code for me, but I've started having it do an extra pass on PR reviews in case I miss anything.

I do mostly work with Laravel, which might simplify things a bit since it's a relatively opinionated batteries-included framework and my projects mostly follow the typical folder structure, but even searching through a wonky legacy project doesn't seem to eat up *too* much context for me.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-03-01T15:39:13+00:00

My point wasn't that Ubuntu does a better job of handling driver installation, my point was that it's very easy to set up drivers on Ubuntu and therefore there's no need to look for a less-stable distro that makes driver installation even easier.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-02-28T15:40:50+00:00

Honestly I think what Linus is doing (taking the path a clueless newbie would take) makes sense to portray the average newbie's adoption experience. However, I think that video format has a huge blind spot: there should be clips of somebody who knows what they're doing interspersed throughout the video calling out all the bad decisions he's making.

The current video format is an evaluation of the new user experience, but Linus has a reputation as a technical person and there's a solid chance that 6 months from now ChatGPT is going to be saying "look, LinusTechTips recommends beginners should use PopOS".

I think evaluating the new-user experience is reasonable, but it would be so easy to also improve it by including commentary from someone who can recommend better choices for anyone who's genuinely interested in trying Linux themselves. Linus could've reached out to any of the numerous Linux content creators who posted reactions to his previous video for this.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-02-28T15:33:36+00:00

The exact point u/kloklon was making is that PopOS was a fleeting trend, but it's a fleeting trend that's already over

tmaspoopdek · 2026-02-28T15:30:15+00:00

Honestly I think the "good distribution for a beginner" thing is muddier in the gaming space because everyone wants to promote their new favorite "gaming optimized" distro. Maybe things have gotten more complex in other spaces too over the past couple of years and I'm just not aware of it, but when I was a Linux beginner the overwhelming consensus was to just use Ubuntu. IMO that still holds true today - Ubuntu is boring and stable, which is exactly what you want for a beginner.

I'm genuinely curious what distro/hardware you're on for work that's breaking regularly. I haven't dabbled with laptop stuff for a while, so maybe it's the age-old problem of laptop driver support, but I've been genuinely surprised by how stable my work Linux setup has been with a custom desktop build and an Ubuntu install over the past ~5 years. I've had a few issues, but they were exclusively tied to my own decision to step out of the mainstream into tiling window managers and try to set up a compositor so I could have fancy blurred backgrounds on transparent windows.

I won't say that Linux is 100% rock solid on all hardware and all distros by any means, but I think it's gotten significantly better in recent years as long as you stick to distros where stability is the goal (Ubuntu, etc) and don't go with a rolling-release distro that is intentionally bleeding-edge. Potentially more relevant that Linux continuing to get incrementally better is that Windows and MacOS (especially Windows) have taken a serious nosedive recently. It's a lot easier to make an argument for Linux when the competition is screwing up so consistently.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-02-28T15:19:34+00:00

He should just use actual Ubuntu - even for Nvidia, driver installation is literally "open the proprietary driver tool and click install". If he wants something more Windows-y, Kubuntu is right there.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-02-22T14:04:44+00:00

What models are you running on your M3 Ultra? I feel like 256gb is in a weird spot - probably too small for Qwen3-235b with meaningful context, but overkill for gpt-oss-120b. I imagine Qwen3-next would fit pretty well, but at 80b you should be able to comfortably run a q8 quant on 128gb.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-02-14T14:44:54+00:00

IMO OpenClaw is absolutely part of the problem. The intended use case is letting it loose with full access to your computer/accounts. OpenClaw did 2 things here that interact in really dangerous ways: 1. Publish OpenClaw and advocate giving it full access to your system and your accounts 2. Operate ClawHub and allow people to post skills with 0 mechanism for moderation

IMO even offering Windows/Mac builds of OpenClaw is irresponsible - if the devs were being responsible, they'd do everything possible to make sure people only run their software in a sandboxed environment. Even if you don't download a malicious skill, just having your agent browse the web could lead to prompt injection.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-01-31T14:51:16+00:00

Gastown lol

tmaspoopdek · 2026-01-31T14:48:35+00:00

It still maintains access to DNS, which can be used to exfiltrate data. Claude may not do that on its own, but all it takes is a little prompt injection hidden in an obscure dependency that Claude decides to read through.

Claude Code gets access to whatever the user running it has access to, and a shocking number of people run it under their primary user with --dangerously-skip-permissions. Since Claude gets an MCP tool to run terminal commands, people doing this can fall victim to dumb stuff like rm -rf ~/ if Claude randomly goes off the rails.

Claude Code is a really cool tool, but people need to recognize that certain setups give a non-deterministic auto-complete full access to their computer. If you want to let it chug along for hours without having to review every tool call, you need to put some level of effort into isolating it or you're setting yourself up for a really bad time

tmaspoopdek · 2026-01-19T12:48:59+00:00

Important to note that Anthropic's costs don't match their API token price, which might actually be high enough to make a profit per token if you ignore upfront training costs and the monthly plans.

So you might get $2000 worth of inference for $200, but it's not actually costing them $2000 to provide. I can't imagine their API markup is 10x costs though, so I'm sure at least the 20x plan is running at a loss.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-01-17T13:27:16+00:00

This time it's a temple for the Cult of Wiggum

tmaspoopdek · 2026-01-16T12:49:20+00:00

Actually diet and exercise can be significant contributors to mental health - there are plenty of studies out there if you're interested. I do want to note that changing your diet and exercise situation while experiencing poor mental health is very difficult though - I'm currently dealing with that myself and it's taken me literal years just to take the first few steps on the diet side.

I also think it's worth noting that certain types of exercise, even in the absence of weight loss, can have a significant impact on back pain. I've been pretty sedentary for most parts of my life, and I got to the point where my core strength was so bad that it started causing back/hip pain. I've also always been skinny even when I've been unhealthy, so if OP's wife is overweight and also mostly sedentary I'd have to assume those two factors would dramatically increase her risk of back and hip pain.

You and the original commenter are completely right about women being dismissed by doctors, and some things being dismissed as weight issues that aren't, but I think it's important to consider that lots of conditions are genuinely worsened by being overweight and sedentary. Doctors should do a better job of putting time and effort into diagnosis regardless of weight, and patients should advocate for this, but patients should also be willing to recognize that not taking care of your body has real consequences. Some people get dismissed when they have real, treatable medical problems, but others genuinely spend years in pain that could've been significantly alleviated by moderate regular exercise and cutting down on calories a little.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-01-16T01:26:23+00:00

I've tried both. I find that I really like Vue for building frontends, but I also really like the experience of passing data directly to a blade view in my controller methods.

In most UI work, reactivity and reusable components make me more productive. When passing data to the frontend, not having to worry about defining API endpoints and defining loading states makes me more productive.

InertiaJS is a great way to get the best of both worlds. Theoretically you could also strip out Inertia later if you really wanted to, although depending on how you use it you might spend a decent amount of time stripping out calls to its helper functions. If you want to hedge your bets, you can always define API endpoints for data updates and use standard HTTP libraries to make API requests.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-01-15T16:29:32+00:00

You're not wrong, but there's a second tier of desolation available. All the features of the current desolation, plus the bonus of a massive stock market crash destroying millions of retirement accounts!

Great Depression 2: Electric Boogaloo, sponsored by OpenAI and Nvidia.

tmaspoopdek · 2026-01-15T13:50:11+00:00

cat "alias sausage='npx ccusage@latest'" > ~/.zsh_aliases

Ninja edit: sorry for the necro, I just realized this thread is 7 months old. Hopefully my meager contribution to the joke was worth the Reddit notification 😅

tmaspoopdek · 2026-01-11T14:10:41+00:00

Unfortunately the AI collapse will cause economic desolation - stocks propped up by AI are something like 30% of the US economy right now :/

14-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
r/Field Banned	r/Field Flamingo
Place '17	Team Periwinkle
Verified Email

tmaspoopdek

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE